Monday, 17 July 2017

The West must go beyond 'reason' - a synthesis and analysis by William Wildblood

A powerful and motivating piece by William Wildblood at the Albion Awakening blog.

Here is an excerpt:

The
fundamental problem is this. The West is going along with, even
instigating, its own destruction because of self-hatred on the one hand
and loss of confidence and general lack of concern with what is right on
the other. This clearly shows a culture that has come to the end of its
time and a conclusion might be that the West is dying and there is not
much point in trying to resist that.

But
I don't agree. Yes, it may well be dying and we should not expect any
sudden resurrection but that is no reason to go quietly. We should not
meekly accept this destruction but stand against it, not with the hope
of preventing it but with the aim of providing a beacon to all those
being dragged down who might be desperately searching for some kind of
light in the darkness that surrounds them.

The
West was (not exclusively but largely) formed by Christianity. Its
rejection of Christianity has left it spiritually high and dry and that
has been taken advantage of by, I have to say, forces of evil who seek
spiritual destruction. Hence the situation we have today with all the
anti-spiritual ideologies we are surrounded by which can only lead us to
a kind of nihilism. These ideologies can be grouped together under the
broad umbrella term of 'the left', the real agenda of which has always
been the destruction of religion though it is happy to have tamed
versions of religion existing if these have adopted its core principles
over and above their spiritual aspect which is now seen in the light of
those principles. Thus many versions of Christianity have been
'liberalised' and today would not be able to make such standard
traditional statements as
the expression of homosexuality is a spiritual error, woman should be
the helpmate of man rather than his equal in all things (meaning equal
in terms offunction
not worth) and mass immigration destroys the spiritual cohesion of a
nation, without being described (and mocked) as 'extremist'.The
great difficulty for a traditional conservative thinker nowadays is
this. We live in an age that worships reason and thinks it is the
highest faculty we have. A spiritual person knows that is nonsense but
cannot prove it to someone who cannot see it because that person lacks,
or denies themselves, the wherewithal to do so. I personally believe
this is often a matter of will not intellect which compounds the
problem. The materialist wants to believe what he does thus doing the very thing he accuses the religious person of doing, a common phenomenon.So
many things are known, by common sense, instinct, intuition, faith,
tradition, call it what you will, that cannot be rationally proved
because reason belongs to the material as opposed to the spiritual
world. It is phenomenally based and cannot go unaided beyond that. It
stops at the doorway to spiritual reality. And this is why the
traditional right is always on the back foot against the left. The left
is a rationally constructed ideology. It has no basis in truth, in what
fundamentally is, but it is reasonable, logical and even right
according to the materialistic parameters it has set up and in which it
operates. Any version of the right that accepts those parameters, and
most seem to today, has lost the battle before it starts. If those
parameters apply then there is no rational argument against the left. Of
course they don't apply, and reality is reality so there is always an
argument against them but it is intuitive and founded on spiritual
truth. You can't prove it or even argue it within the limitations of the
world the left has constructed for itself.Therefore
I say that if Albion (or anywhere else) is to awaken from its current
spiritual stupor it must reject reason. Don't be alarmed. I'm not
suggesting a retreat to irrational behaviour. I am saying that it must
reject the pre-eminence of reason. It must go beyond reason to
imagination and inner vision. It must see that the square of this world
doesn't exist by itself but is an expression of the cube of a higher
one. At the very least it must return to common sense and instinct and
an appreciation of the natural order. If we can't reach the spiritual
just yet then at least let us recover the natural. The rational is no
place to be.

6 comments:

I do not accept that, "The left is a rationally constructed ideology. It has no basis in truth, in what fundamentally is, but it is reasonable, logical and even right according to the materialistic parameters it has set up and in which it operates."

It is perfectly clear, when you actually try to reason logically from the basic premises of Marxism (both doctrinaire and cultural), one immediately comes to conclusions that utterly contradict what the Marxists want to assert, and often contradict other logical results of Marxist premises. It's a bit like trying to reason from the premise that the square root of 2 is a rational (that is, finitely calculable) number which can be represented as some integer value a over some integer value b.

There is more truth to saying, "Any version of the right that accepts those parameters, and most seem to today, has lost the battle before it starts." That's not because there is no logical proof that Marxism is illogical working from its own premises, but because Marxists (like Pythagoras) is willing to resort to violence rather than accept the irrefutable proof of their error.

When you argue with a reasonable man, presenting a logical proof of his error results in him changing his mind. When you treat the unreasonable as if they were reasonable, you only invite violence against yourself. That, and that alone, is the key thing to understand about Marxists, both doctrinaire and cultural, whether or not they openly acknowledge themselves as such.

There is no great intellectual difficulty about seeing the obvious logical consequences of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Someone who insists that morality consists of punishing those who produce good consequences through their own choices and rewarding those who produce bad consequences through their own choices must simply be identified and treated as lacking reason.

Reasonable men do not accept the premise that one must treat unreasonable men as if they were reasonable. And up till a few decades ago, Western Civilization didn't. It accepted that the reasonable response to unreason was to throughly prepare to effectually suppress their capacity to have their way through violence, and then resort to such suppression (including to the point of death) without hesitation when it became necessary.

@CC - My view is that motivation is the most important aspect - the Left is understandable only in terms of its (implicit) motivation - which is anti-Good (ie demonic). That is (ultimately) why the Left is incoherent.

(Of course, in practice, anti-Good is never wholly evil - nothing is, since that is itself incoherent; and some Leftists are mostly Good. Also anti-Leftism is not an answer, exactly because the Left includes some good. The only coherent antidote to Leftism is that to which Leftism is primarily opposed: Christianity.)

I take CCL’s point. I wrote this piece in something of a rush, from a dream actually or at least it came to me when I was asleep. What I meant was that it’s very difficult to adopt a purely reason based argument against such ‘leftisms’ as homosexuality is fine, equality of men and women is fine and mass immigration is fine. You can but you can’t prove it. Intuition knows all this is false but if you attack the error from within a materialistic perspective you can bat the argument back and forth forever and not get anywhere conclusive.

What you are calling the unreasonable (which is correct) is the same as what I call those of perverted will, I think. But then I hardly know anyone who is not 'unreasonable' in this sense. It sometimes seems that practically the whole world is.

"We live in an age that worships reason and thinks it is the highest faculty we have."

We must acknowledge, however, that the Left has subverted and inverted reason just like they have everything else. The "reason" that the Left worships today is the OPPOSITE of reason traditionally understood. Today's Leftist "reason" consists of the ability to have (and to express) the politically correct emotional reaction to any issue or problem. As Bruce notes in Thought Prison, the Left is *immune* to reason because it is psychotic and reacts violently to any effort to test its ideas through logical, evidence-based, experience-based or common sense analysis (all of which are dismissed and punished as "hate" these days).

"A spiritual person knows that is nonsense but cannot prove it to someone who cannot see it because that person lacks, or denies themselves, the wherewithal to do so."

A spiritual person could use reason to prove that the ideas that govern us today are nonsense, but again, this is irrelevant because those ideas are "utterly and completely immune to evidence such that unanimity of incontrovertible evidence against [those ideas] is still insufficient to induce significant re-evaluation."

"The left is a rationally constructed ideology."

Thought Prison shows this is not so, but it doesn't matter. If you point out that it is irrational, they'll just put their fingers in their ears and scream until you go away. Or they will have you arrested on hate crime charges.

"It has no basis in truth, in what fundamentally is, but it is reasonable, logical and even right according to the materialistic parameters it has set up and in which it operates"

Any conclusions that follow from a false premise are also false regardless of how logically constructed.

"Therefore I say that if Albion (or anywhere else) is to awaken from its current spiritual stupor it must reject reason."

No, no. What it must reject is Political Correctness. This does not require rejecting reason. BUT reason is nonetheless the wrong weapon to use against it.

It may be that the difficulty is actually embracing the premises on which Marxist assertions rest and really arguing from them, rather than unconsciously relying on reservations which come from a Christian set of metaphysical assumptions. Marxists themselves often consciously rely on the unwillingness of Christians to advocate evil (defined in a Christian perspective), and are generally shocked when someone really argues as if Christianity is not assumed to be true.

When someone asserts that homosexuality (for example) is fine, I go ahead and throw out the 'baby' of Christian ideals about the eternal worth of the individual along with the 'bathwater' of Christian commandments against sin, formalizing for purposes of argument the inevitable and obvious consequence of eviscerating the teachings of Christ. It is then very easy to demonstrate quickly to those who are drawn into believing 'love wins' that once you say that the Christian commandments are not an expression of love, then expressing your love of humans by butchering and eating those you regard as sexually desirable (for example) is as logical (indeed, more so) as homosexuality.

Of course, while most people influenced by Marxist ideas are not evil enough to fail to be shocked at this result, there are some who are not. They are not happy to be discovered, but they know and secretly practice just such outcomes of their premises. I cannot venture to guess what the actual proportion is, the relatively high fraction I have encountered may be my own bad luck.